E3 2005: Death Jr. Interview

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Backbone's Chris Charla talks about his need to mow down enemies in this PSP action killer.

By Jason Allen

What's the only thing better than playing an all new build of Death Jr. at E3 2005? Getting the latest info from the game's producer, Chris Charla, to find out even more about the game that you guys at home will be playing pretty soon. We got a chance to chat with Chris about the final phase of the game's design, the challenges in development, and the joys of Meatworld. Check out what he had to say.

IGN: What's new in the Death Jr. build here at E3?

Chris Charla, Producer of Death Jr.: There's actually a lot of huge improvements. In the last couple week we've hit tech completion and now we're just adding features and adding the fun. So some of the things you'll see in the build today is that you're able to different combos with the sythe. You're able to knock guys up in the air. You can actually juggle them in the air with the guns. You can use the Sythe to knock projectiles back at enemies. It' really fun. It terms of the levels, just about every level in the game you can get to. It's an E3 build. So when it starts, it sort of randomly picks a level. If you complete that level, you can go back to the museum hub, you can go to almost every level in the game, except for some of the boss battles.

IGN: What are you guys still working for the final build?

Charla: It's getting pretty close. Obviously we're still working on polishing, tweaking a few little things. Make sure the camera's perfect. We're going to be looking at all the feedback we get from E3 to see what things are left that we need to just do. It getting reasonably close to shipping.

IGN: What's been the most challenging part of this production?

Charla: That would probably be the camera, because without that second analog stick it's really hard to control the camera on the PSP. You can't control the camera on the PSP because you only got one analog stick, especially if you're using the second analog stick for shooting. You have to use a method of using the shoulder buttons, which is kind of familiar to everybody from the old Playstation days. It takes a couple minutes to get used to, but once you get used to it, it feels pretty natural. Beyond that the most challenging thing on a technical level was getting the load times down really low. One of the things we're really proud about is just about every game on the show floor, and certainly many of the games that have been released so far, DJ has by far the fastest load times. And we have some huge levels in there, but we developed a very battery safe paging system that enables us to get 60 mb of level data into one level with no perceptible load times.

IGN: What visual elements made it into this build at E3?

Charla: Yeah, the lighting is very close to final now. It's all real time lighting. Every light affects everything in the entire game. So it's not canned or baked-in lighting. Every light is realtime. The game feels really colorful. Obviously the effects are something we're really proud of. The lightening gun, and just all the particle effects - how much stuff you can blow up in the world.

IGN: Where do you guys see DJ going from here?

Charla: We love what's in the first game. There's a ton of stuff in there. There's some stuff we couldn't get to - wireless multiplayer. There's a lot left to explore in the world. This is a really big world, as you can see from the comic book, and other things. There's a lot left to explore here, and we would love to explore it with future titles.

Charla: We have a lot of PSP games in development right now. I don't know if I could say how many. It would almost take more than one hand to count them.

IGN: What's your favorite weapon in DJ?

Charla: My favorite weapon is the electric gun. Once you power it up, you can chain multiple enemies together. It's just incredibly fun to just be able to mow through these guys that have been making your life miserable three or four levels.

IGN: What's your favorite stage?

Charla: Meatworld. Any kind of meat themed amusement park is ok with me.